Understanding how Wikipedia works

Instead describing the website from it's own perspective the better idea is to take a birds eye perspective and observe what the role of Wikipedia in a capitalist context is. The education sector which includes universities, private owned libraries and book publishers is operating as a for profit business. That means, a book publishers likes to earn money and a university takes the money from the students to pay the rent of the building. If the management of a book publisher is doing everything right, the company generates revenue and is able to pay all the bills. This is equal to run a successful business.

Some companies, which are less then 10%, are not managed good enough. The financial situation looks bad, and in the past some wrong decision were made by the top management. That means, the company doesn't generate a profit but a loss. And here comes Wikipedia into the game. What Wikipedia is doing is to meet universities and unprofitable book publishers to explain them the benefit of free knowledge. For example, if an academic book publisher goes into bankruptcy, the content which was generated by the employees has no value anymore and can be transferred to the Open educational resources platform. And if a university with a long tradition is no longer able to pay the bills, the former professors and students are angry against their institution and they are invited to contribute to the Wikipedia website with their knowledge.

Basically spoken, Wikipedia is not a successful company but it's some kind of failed project which is feed with negative information. Between a well running academic publisher and Wikipedia there is a large gap and this gap is a good idea, because the book publisher has understand what capitalism is about. The idea of capitalism is to make profit, to earn money and to grow. It's about become rich and famous and be competitive on the market.

To understand what the difference between success and failure is, we have to describe the mechanism of the value chain. A normal company for example a university, gets money from the students and pays the money to the professors. That means that the professor is paid for his work. If the professor is doing a good job and the university is attractive to the students, the company is able to increase it's profit. In contrast, WIkipedia and Open Science in general isn't operating under such constraint. Basically spoken, WIkipedia is an anti-cooperation.

Let us listen, what the Commercial Manager of Swets has to say about the future of academic publishing. Swets was a dutch content broker for libraries which runs into bankruptcy in 2014:

quote: “The pressure is high. We expect more and more from them. Nobody likes to change really. But if you bring change in a positive way, that's important.”, source “Swets Enjoys Change: Changing the view”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BgD0FcSCY